Contextual Wage Inequality, Gender Pay Gaps, and Life Satisfaction Across German Occupations and Industries

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 8. Race, Gender, and Inequality

Abstract

Gender stratification research has documented persistent gender pay gaps and gendered sorting across occupations and industries, yet we know far less about how gendered wage structures in proximate labor-market contexts relate to women’s and men’s subjective well-being. This matters because well-being responses indicate whether gendered pay arrangements are experienced as consequential or instead normalized. Existing work has focused primarily on macro-level inequality, even though workers encounter very different wage environments across the labor market.
This study examines Germany as a strategic case where wage setting has historically been shaped strongly by sectoral institutions and standardized job classifications, and where occupational and sectoral gender segregation remains pronounced. It applies a contextual measurement strategy using the Earnings Survey 2023, a legally mandated employer-reported survey administered by the Federal Statistical Office and used for official wage and gender-equality monitoring. Based on administrative-quality earnings information for roughly 10 million employees, I construct contextual indicators of overall wage inequality, within-gender inequality among women and among men, and contextual gender pay gaps for about 900 occupations and about 80 industries. These indicators are linked survey data from the 2023 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
Descriptive results show substantial heterogeneity in wage structures within Germany and meaningful variation in gendered wage arrangements across contexts, including a non-trivial minority of occupations with reversed gender pay gaps. Cross-classified multilevel models on about 11,000 respondents then assess whether exposure to contextual wage inequality and contextual gender pay gaps is related to life satisfaction and whether associations differ for women and men. Overall, the study demonstrates the value of contextual measurement for gender stratification research and provides a framework for assessing when and for whom gendered wage structures matter for subjective well-being.

Author

• Peter Valet, University of Bamberg